Piyush Kumar Sharma
Assistant Professor || CSE Department || Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi
Email: piyush at iitd.ac.in || Room No. 421, Bharti Building
Looking for motivated students. Feel free to drop a message (formal advertisement coming soon).
My research broadly encompasses security, systems, and networks. Specifically, I develop frameworks, perform large-scale measurements, and build systems for deploying and facilitating the use of privacy-enhancing technologies.
I am currently working as an Assistant Professor in the CSE Department at IIT Delhi. Previously I was a senior research fellow at the University of Michigan with Prof. Roya Ensafi and a Postdoctoral researcher at COSIC, KU Leuven, in Belgium, with Prof. Claudia Diaz. I completed my PhD from IIIT Delhi, India with the thesis titled 'Building Performant, Privacy-enhancing and Blocking-resistant Communication Systems'
Latest News
- [September 2025] Paper accepted at NDSS NDSS 2026.
- [May 2025] Paper accepted at PETS 2025.
- [November 2024] Two papers accepted at NDSS 2025.
- [July 2024] Excited to obtain the FOCI Rising Star Award 2024.
- [February 2024] Presented our work LARMix at NDSS symposium 2024.
Publications
- MVPNalyzer: An Investigative Framework for the Security & Privacy Audit of Mobile VPNs
Wayne Wang*, Aaron Ortwein*, Enrique Sobrados*, Robert Stanley, Afsah Anwar, Piyush Kumar Sharma and Roya Ensafi
Pre-Print (To appear in proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium) (NDSS) 2026
* (Authors have equal contribution) - CenPush: Blocking-Resistant Communication Using Push Notifications [link]
Piyush Kumar Sharma, Diwen Xue, Aaron Ortwein, Cecylia Bocovich, Harry and Roya Ensafi
In proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2025 - LAMP: Lightweight Approaches for Latency Minimization in Mixnets with Practical Deployment Considerations [link]
Mahdi Rahimi, Piyush Kumar Sharma and Claudia Diaz
In proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2025 - The Discriminative Power of Cross-layer RTTs in Fingerprinting Proxy Traffic [link]
Diwen Xue, Robert Stanley, Piyush Kumar Sharma and Roya Ensafi
In proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2025 - Is Custom Congestion Control a Bad Idea for Circumvention Tools?
Wayne Wang, Diwen Xue, Piyush Kumar Sharma, Ayush Mishra, Anonymous, and Roya Ensafi
In Free and Open Communication over the Internet (FOCI), co-located with Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2025 - LARMix: Latency-Aware Routing in Mix Networks [link]
Mahdi Rahimi, Piyush Kumar Sharma and Claudia Diaz
In proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2024 - PTPerf: On the Performance Evaluation of Tor Pluggable Transports [link]
Zeya Umayya, Dhruv malik, Devashish Gosain and Piyush Kumar Sharma
In proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC) 2023 - On the Anonymity of Peer-To-Peer Network Anonymity Schemes Used by Cryptocurrencies [link]
Piyush Kumar Sharma, Devashish Gosain and Claudia Diaz
In proceedings of Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS) 2023 - Dolphin: A Cellular Voice Based Internet Shutdown Resistance System [link]
Piyush Kumar Sharma, Rishi Sharma, Kartikey Singh, Mukulika Maity and Sambuddho Chakravarty
In proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS) 2023 - Camoufler: Accessing The Censored Web By Utilizing Instant Messaging Channels [link]
Piyush Kumar Sharma, Devashish Gosain, Sambuddho Chakravarty
In Proceedings of ACM Asia Conference on Communication and Computer Security (AsiaCCS 2021). - The Road Not Taken: Re-thinking the Feasibility of Voice Calling Over Tor [link]
Piyush Kumar Sharma, Shashwat Chaudhary*, Nikhil Hassija*, Mukulika Maity, and Sambuddho Chakravarty
In Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2020). (* Equal contribution of authors) - SiegeBreaker: An SDN Based Practical Decoy Routing System [link]
Piyush Kumar Sharma, Devashish Gosain, Himanshu Sagar, Chaitanya Kumar, Aneesh Dogra, Vinayak Naik, H.B. Acharya, and Sambuddho Chakravarty
In Proceedings of Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2020). - Maginot Lines and Tourniquets: On the Defendability of National Cyberspace [link]
Devashish Gosain, Madhur Rawat, Piyush Kumar Sharma, H.B. Acharya
In proceedings of Local Computer Networks (LCN Symposium 2020). - Where The Light Gets In: Analyzing Web Censorship Mechanisms in India [link]
Tarun Kumar Yadav*, Akshat Sinha*, Devashish Gosain*, Piyush Kumar Sharma, Sambuddho Chakravarty
In proceedings of ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2018). (*Shared First Authorship) - SiegeBreaker: SDN Based Decoy Routing System [link]
Piyush Kumar Sharma, Chaitanya Kumar, Aneesh Dogra, Vinayak Naik, H.B. Acharya, Sambuddho Chakravarty
WIP published in ACSAC 2017.
Academic Service
- PC 2026: Usenix Security, IEEE S&P
- PC 2025: Usenix Security, PETS, TheWebConf (formerly WWW), Euro S&P
- PC 2024: CCS, PETS, TheWebConf (formerly WWW), WiSec, FOCI
- PC 2023: PETS
- PC 2022: ESORICS
- External Reviewer: PETS 2022, PETS 2021
Teaching
- WINTER 2025 - Substitute Lecturer for 588- Computer & Network Security at University of Michigan
- FALL 2023 - Delivered a lecture on VPNs as part of the Privacy Technologies course at KU Leuven
- WINTER 2023 - Co-taught Advanced Privacy Technologies course at KU Leuven
- FALL 2022 - Taught the complete course and lectures for Privacy Technologies and co-taught Privacy and Big Data course at KU Leuven
- FALL 2021 - Took lecture on Censorship and Anti-censorship technologies for the Privacy Technologies course at KU Leuven